In the healthcare landscape, small to medium-sized (SMBs) and rural hospitals have an important role to play in providing critical care to patients in local or remote communities. The patients who depend on these facilities cannot afford for their local hospitals to experience cyber attacks that lead to delayed patient care or downtime of any kind.
In order to scale security efforts in a smaller environment, adopting several key strategies can help these hospitals quickly deploy cybersecurity measures that address the most critical exposures and protect key clinical and non-clinical workflows. Read on to learn how small and medium-sized, as well as rural hospitals can protect what matters most.
Cybersecurity Challenges in Small to Medium-Sized Hospitals
Small to medium-sized hospitals face many challenges that can make it difficult to implement robust cybersecurity measures. Smaller security teams and workforce challenges, fewer resources, aging infrastructure, and budget constraints can all lead to gaps in your security posture. Having a comprehensive solution in place is the first step in bridging those gaps.
As healthcare continues to be a target for cyber criminals, small to medium-sized hospitals must recognize that not only is patient data at risk, but internet of things (IoT) devices, cyber-physical systems (CPS), building management systems (BMS) and medical devices are increasingly exploited. In fact, Claroty’s research team found that 23% of medical devices analyzed contain vulnerabilities present in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
With the right expertise, policies, and cyber protection platform, your hospital can overcome these challenges and impose strategies that reduce risk and build a longterm foundation for better healthcare cybersecurity.
Solutions to Protect Patients, Data, and Devices
In evaluating protection platforms for small to medium-sized hospitals, potential solutions must:
Provide visibility through robust asset discovery
Identify the most critical exposures and provide recommendations
Offer policy enforcement designed to protect existing network infrastructure
Enable improved operational efficiency
Detect threats aligning with industry frameworks
Integrate with current security solutions
Let’s dive deeper into each of these critical strategies:
Robust asset discovery for full visibility
Having an accurate, complete asset inventory is the foundation to any healthcare organization’s cyber strategy. You can’t protect every device connected to your network if you don’t have full accountability of what they are, where they are located, or what other devices they are communicating with. Asset discovery through deep-packet inspection (DPI), paired with both active and passive collection methods, safe for operational technology (OT) and CPS devices, are essential for comprehensive visibility.
Identify business-critical exposures and deploy remediations
Your security team likely has an impossibly long list of exposures to address with few resources to identify which exposures pose the greatest risk to your environment. That’s why implementing an exposure management solution that prioritizes business-critical exposures that will have the greatest impact to your hospital’s operations is key. Not only identifying, but offering remediations to manage these exposures before they’re exploited by cyber criminals helps alleviate the demands on your security team and enables workflows with robust reporting.
Network protection with policy enforcement
Any solution for network protection should offer clear policies that are based specifically on your network’s operational context and existing network infrastructure. Segmentation that’s informed by domain expertise and asset visibility help to define network zones, simplifying the process of monitoring and enforcing communication policies.
Improve operational efficiency
Streamlining your hospital’s operational efficiency is another key aspect of top cybersecurity solutions that can make your cyber journey smoother. From device lifecycle management through utilization to important location information and device operational status, you should look for a solution that offers efficiency recommendation and trend reporting that will make the case for ROI of device management.
Threat detection that aligns with industry frameworks
Using clinical and contextual awareness to detect known, unknown, and signature-based threats is imperative in a hospital setting. Additionally, aligning with the MITRE ATT&CK for Enterprise Framework ensures your organization is following industry best practices. Choosing a solution that offers real-time alerting to detected threats and follows industry frameworks goes a long way in protecting your hospital.
Integrations with current security solutions
Implementing a new cybersecurity solution doesn’t mean starting over from scratch. If your organization already relies on solutions like endpoint detection and response (EDR), network access controls (NACs), or firewalls, look for a platform that integrates seamlessly with these other tactics for comprehensive protection.
Why Claroty for Healthcare
Claroty xDome for healthcare is the key to helping small to medium-sized and rural hospitals build a strong cybersecurity foundation that helps protect your patients, data, and CPS devices.
Purpose-built for healthcare Claroty xDome emphasizes the following core capabilities:
Asset Discovery
Exposure Management
Network Protection
Operational Efficiency
Threat Detection
In addition to comprehensive CPS cybersecurity measures, Claroty stands apart from other protection platforms due to its breadth of expertise and experience in healthcare.
Robust Data Foundation: Claroty offers several discovery methods to deliver comprehensive and dynamic asset visibility, which underscores all security workflows and controls.
Healthcare Expertise: With deep healthcare expertise, Claroty currently protects over 75 small hospitals in the US. Through this experience, Claroty can offer solutions that work for this size and scale
Strong Technical Alliances and Integrations: By partnering with several top security and asset management solutions, Claroty provides seamless integrations with your existing workflow.
As small and medium-sized hospitals work to strengthen their cybersecurity and protect their patients, data, and CPS devices, partnering with a solution like Claroty can make all the difference when it matters most.
For more information about how Claroty can equip your healthcare system with the solutions it needs, speak to one of our experts today.
